Anchorage, 1976 — Albert and Waxy flunk their Intro to Philosophy midterm and drunkenly decide to drop out of The Ohio State University and go to Alaska to "strike it rich" working on the Trans Alaska Pipeline. After Albert's father cuts off his credit card, they get bartending & dishwashing jobs at an Anchorage bar, where Albert becomes involved with the bar owner's girlfriend, CiCi, who is also the lead singer in the house band. Albert "acquires" a union card to get a pipeline job for himself, but then learns that Waxy has become part of a crazy scheme with Jimmi the Pilot, Beantown Bob and Moe the Eskimo to find and recover a long lost government payroll from an Air Force cargo plane that crashed in the Alaska Mountain Range decades ago.

M.T. Bass is a scribbler of fiction who holds fast to the notion that while victors may get to write history, novelists get to write/right reality. He lives, writes, flies and makes music in Mudcat Falls, USA.

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I appreciate your help with the Somethin' for Nothin' Blog Tour. ~M.T. Bass

“Come on, Buckeye Boy. Over here,” Mac called out as he gathered his crew together. “Grab a shovel. You know the drill.”

Albert waved and trotted over, holding his hard hat down on his head. Diesel exhaust fumes filled the air as it seemed like a whole herd of trucks, bulldozers, power shovels and sidebooms had gathered there like huge, prehistoric beasts at a watering hole. Some idled, others groaned under the weight of their labors pushing, scraping and drilling the earth; lifting and stacking huge sections of four-foot diameter pipe; or shoveling gravel into dump trucks to carry and drop somewhere further north or south along the pipeline’s path. Albert grabbed a shovel and climbed up into the back of a yellow Alyeska pickup truck. Before he sat down, Mac pounded on the cab and the truck took off heading north to some anonymous spot between the clearing crews and the welders, where Mac’s crew was assigned to help erect Vertical Support Members, the giant H-shaped towers that would hold the pipeline high up off the valley floor to keep the hot flowing oil from melting the permafrost as it zig-zagged its way south from Prudhoe Bay. Although diesel-powered machines did the heavy lifting, there were literally millions of shovelfuls of dirt, gravel and debris that had to be dug, moved and replaced by the member muscles of Laborers Local 942. Albert stared down into the pan of his shovel, no longer thinking of CiCi and Waxy. He mindlessly watched his breath meet the cold spring air in clouds that appeared and vanished in slugs like a steam engine smoke stack, until the truck stopped. In front of them, augers on the backs of bulldozers drilled twenty-four inch holes in the earth. Sidebooms lifted the vertical supports of the VSMs up and into the holes, holding them in place as crews aligned them and water trucks filled the holes, while Mac’s crew shoveled sand and gravel into the water in the hole, which, once the water froze, would hold the VSM in place like concrete.

“Slow down, man,” Wil said as he elbowed Albert. “Take it easy and pace yourself. We don’t have to finish this bitch in one day.”